Fossilized tiny creatures by the hundreds from the Age of Dinosaurs have been found embedded inside opaque amber -- not the more familiar translucent amber as seen in the movie "Jurassic Park."
Though made from the same tree sap as translucent amber, opaque amber is impenetrable to the human eye and all of the microscopes scientists have previously trained on it. But when European researchers imaged samples of 100-million-year-old opaque amber with high-energy synchrotron X-rays, they found a world teeming with past life.
Malvina Lak of the University of Rennes in France and Paul Tafforeau of the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF) and their colleagues studied bits of the fossils from Charentes, in southwestern France, dating from the mid-Cretaceous period, when dinosaurs such as tyrannosaurs and ankylosaurs roamed the Earth.
"With translucent amber you can directly see the inclusions, but with opaque amber it is exactly like you are looking at a rock — you see nothing," Tafforeau told LiveScience. "We decided to try the synchrotron technique on our samples, and we were quite lucky because the first amber blocks revealed six different inclusions."
So far, the team has identified wasps, flies, ants, spiders and myriad other minuscule creatures that got trapped in the former gelatinous goo. In some cases the position of the fossilized animal indicates it was trapped alive in the tree sap, and in other cases the sap might have fallen on an already dead organism.
As much as 80 percent of the Cretaceous-era amber known is opaque, so the new imaging technique opens up a wealth of fossil data that was previously inaccessible to scientists.
Synchrotron X-rays are created by sending speeding charged particles through magnetic fields. The particles release high-energy light that can pierce through materials that are otherwise difficult to see into.
The scientists hope to use the amber-encased animals to learn more about the climate during the Cretaceous.
Source:Xinhua/Agencies
|
Comment
Tell A Friend
Print Format
Save Article